Asylum and Intermarriages

Abstract

This paper estimates the effect of legal status acquisition motives on intermarriage decisions. The analysis exploits the situation of the Spanish asylumsystem, since it is saturated and failing to process the substantial inflow of the asylum claims. The limitations of the system raise concerns about whether the asylum applicants are seeking alternative ways to acquire their legal statusin Spain, as marrying Spanishcitizens, or Spanish residents. The number of asylum applications reflects the number of asylum seekerswith legal status acquisition motives. We find that the number of submitted asylum applications hasa positive and statistically significant impact on the number of registered intermarriagesin Spain over the period 2008-2016.We estimatethat for every100 additional submitted applications, the number of intermarriages increases by 3.6%, on the provinciallevel.Thus, we show that intermarriages are driven by the legal status acquisition motives of the asylum seekers. The estimated impact is higher when we consider intermarriages with specifically foreign female partnersrelative to those with foreign males.Our baseline results hold across several robustness checksand a placebo test.